The Black Homeownership Tax

The Pay Check

Bloomberg

Society & Culture, Business, Investing

4.4 • 630 Ratings

🗓️ 1 April 2021

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Homeownership has been a main source of intergenerational wealth in the U.S. But it’s one that is out of reach for many Black Americans. Decades after fair housing reforms, the dramatic disparity between Black and White homeownership isn’t getting any better. In this episode, we look at why this gap persists, with many Black homes overtaxed, undervalued and unjustly foreclosed on.

The focus of our story is one problem that's a “textbook case of institutional racism”: In thousands of U.S. counties, the method for calculating property taxes means Black Americans are experiencing unfairly high taxes. It's the reason why Di Leshea Scott is renting a home she used to own.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is an IHeart podcast.
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0:30.6	slash sbs dash Singapore. For most of my family members, holding on to our land in Gilmer, Texas, was simply more trouble than it was worth.
0:45.3	What started with 80 acres of potential farmland, or property to extract resources from, turned into a liability over time.
0:54.8	Why?
0:56.7	Taxes.
1:02.0	My name is Pless Maurice Montgomery III.
1:04.2	You might remember Pless from episode one.
1:09.5	He's a computer technician by trade, 67, and lives in Dallas.
1:16.1	He came into about 24 acres in much the same way my dad did. It was passed down to him from my great-great-aunt-uncle, the Brodies. Plez, more than any relative I spoke to,
1:24.2	has tried to make something of our family's land. He leased a trees on it to a timber company.
1:28.3	He sold oil rights.
1:30.3	He even toyed with the idea of turning it into a farm.
1:33.3	But as time went by, he decided to give up on the land.
1:37.3	Basically, what I decided to do, or what I wanted to do,
1:43.3	was to simply sell the land so that it was no longer
1:47.8	a liability on me or my family.
1:51.2	Problem was, his tax bills kept going up.
1:54.6	When I first started following this, I'd get tax statements every year from Uxher County.
	...

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